Saturday 9 July 2011 19.07 EDT
First published on Saturday 9 July 2011 19.07 EDT

David Morbe had paint on his jeans, his shirt, his hands and the frames of his black-rimmed glasses. Beads of sweat clung to his forehead and ran down his back, past the inch-long shrapnel scar.

Chisel in hand, he walked slowly around the base of his giant sculpture, carefully inspecting the detail on the eagle crest in front, and the name inscribed on the back – John Garang de Mabior.

Morbe knew that nothing he created would ever be as important as the four-metre tall statue of South Sudan's liberation hero that he and his two fellow sculptors had conceived and built.

It was Friday evening in Juba, the southern capital. In a matter of hours, tens of thousands of people, virtually all of whom had suffered in some way during nearly 40 years of conflict since the end of colonial rule, would surround the statue on this dirt field to celebrate the birth of their nation, after a tragic false start 55 years ago. "The independence of Sudan back then was the beginning of slavery in South Sudan," said Morbe, 35, as the sun began to set. "This is going to be the real independence for our people."

"That's the last one [that we sing], the end!" shouted a government official gleefully in the VIP stands.

A man dressed as the Statue of Liberty held a sign that read: "Free at last. Republic of South Sudan."

Soldiers and traditional dance troupes paraded by before the Speaker of the southern parliament read the independence proclamation. The Sudanese flag was lowered, and the flag of South Sudan raised. Kiir took the oath of office. The north-south, Arab-non-Muslim divide that has always existed in Sudan was made official; the country split in two.

"We congratulate our brothers in the south for the establishment of their new state," said Bashir, taking to the podium. "The will of the people of the south has to be respected."

Congratulations flooded in from afar. David Cameron, who was represented by Britain's foreign secretary, William Hague, said it was "an historic day, for South Sudan and the whole of Africa".

"Reaching this moment has required leadership and statesmanship from all sides. The actions of the government in Khartoum in recognising South Sudan's independence have been significant, and I hope that today marks the beginning of a new and peaceful chapter in relations between north and south."

The US president, Barack Obama, granted South Sudan immediate recognition as an independent state. "Today is a reminder that, after the darkness of war, the light of a new dawn is possible," he said.

In the huge crowd, where boys held up paper flags and women ululated, emotions were barely contained. "This is very great actually," said Taifa Kuer, a finance ministry official who, at the age of seven, became one of Sudan's famous "Lost Boys", marching for a month to Ethiopia before returning to fight for the rebel cause when he was just 14. "We have prepared for the next generation so they won't suffer like we had to."

Like many elated southerners, Kuer seemed stunned that the day had in fact arrived, which was perhaps unsurprising, given the mistrust that has existed between the north and south. Indeed, when Bashir and the then rebel leader Garang signed a peace deal to end the second, 21-year-long civil war in 2005, many doubted it would last. The agreement allowed for a six-year interim period where the south would govern itself, and have an equal share with the north of the revenues from the oil produced from beneath its own soil. The prize at the end of the transition was a vote for southerners on unity or secession. Garang advocated unity – the southern struggle was a struggle for marginalised people all over Sudan, he argued – but when he was killed in a helicopter crash just a few months after the peace deal the notion of unity died with him. In the referendum in January, 99% of voters chose secession.

The results spoke less of southern unity – there are dozens of ethnic groups in the south, and no real collective identity – than a desperate desire to rid themselves of the decades-long oppression and marginalisation by the northern government.

When it achieved independence from Britain in 1956, Sudan was two distinct regions and peoples joined into one: a dry, Arab-dominated north, and a more lush, ethnically African south.

The tension and suspicions were already rife; indeed, southern rebels had already taken up arms the year before, fearing, correctly, that the Arab leaders in Khartoum would exploit and abuse them.

Charity Yuyada, 68, who watched the ceremony on television in Juba because she was "too old" to attend in person, remembered being forced to take school classes in Arabic rather than English. "That made us hate that language and the [Arab] people," she said.

That first war lasted 17 years, and claimed hundreds of thousands of lives. Yuyada spent two and half years living in the bush. Peace lasted from 1972 to 1983, before Garang launched a new rebellion led by his Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA).

So heavy was the fighting in the countryside that Yuyada was forced to move to Juba, which was held by northern forces. When the SPLA launched attacks on the city in 1990, Yuyada moved to Khartoum for safety. She stayed there, a second-class citizen separated from her extended family, until this January, when she returned to Juba a day before the referendum.

"In that 21 years of war we had lost hope of freedom," she said. "I'm so happy we are separating."

But her excitement could not hide her lingering bitterness, which was also plain to see in the town centre. Among the many banners offering positive messages for the new country's future, there was this poem, printed on a banner sponsored by the Ministry of Energy and Mining:

Our independence south is our separate house

That embrace all the southerners

To live freely in the bush

Africans with our own traditions

Herders after cows

Farmers in the fields

Fisherman along the Nile

Hunters in the jungle

Illiterate with the goat leathers

Backwards with the bird feathers

Much better than to be scholars, Under the Arabs' domination"

Morbe, the sculptor, had in fact been a scholar under Arab domination. He was born and raised in Juba, suffering the shrapnel wound during the SPLA offensive on the city in the early 1990s. "It was a terrible time here during the war, not possible to describe," he said. "But we bore it."

He was desperate to join the rebels, but it proved extremely difficult, since nobody was allowed to leave Juba without the permission of the northern government. So he concentrated on his studies, and in 2002 he won at place in the fine arts programme at Sudan University of Science and Technology, in Khartoum. On graduation, he wanted to take up a teaching post, but was denied "because I am a southern and I am not Muslim", he said.

Instead, he returned to the south, finding work as a teaching assistant at Juba University's arts faculty. Last year, together with two other southern fine arts graduates, Anthony Gordon and Emmanuel Mateayo, he came up with the idea of a giant sculpture to commemorate the new nation.

After presenting the proposal to the government's council of ministers, they received the go-ahead and a budget – and the news that the statue would be the centrepiece of the independence celebrations. "I am so proud to have been part of this moment," Morbe said. "This day that we have wished for."